Angry in the Great White North

The Liberals and the NDP just don't seem to get it.

They are criticizing the decision of the Conservative Party to sponsor Pierre Bourque's NASCAR efforts, and so show off the Conservative logo at NASCAR events across Canada. One criticism is that the audience is small and very homogeneous:

Bob Stellick, a Toronto-based sports-marketing consultant, said NASCAR Canada is building on an existing base of people who are fans of U.S. NASCAR races.

He said that generally, NASCAR fans are less wealthy and more white than fans of other professional sports.

However, audiences are still small. The Canadian Tire NASCAR races are taped and broadcast later on TSN. The audiences are expected to be much lower than the 300,000 Canadians who typically watch races in the top-tier U.S.-based NASCAR Nextel Cup series.

It's not a market that the Liberal Party of Canada will enter any time soon. "It's American-style marketing based on focus groups. I find it bizarre that they're pretending to be environmental champions with these types of actions," Liberal MP Denis Coderre said.

The Conservatives are not trying to be environmental champions with this sponsorship. That is a different group. This is the NASCAR group.

Get it?

OK, you still don't get it.

Right, time to teach you about the long tail.

Imagine a graph in which you list the things that interest Canadians along the horizontal axis. For each interest, you place a bar representing the number of Canadians who think this is the most important thing. Then you arrange the interests so that the tallest bar goes first, then the next, and so on. You'll get a graph that looks something like this:

This first bar might be the environment, the next one health care, then Afghanistan, then taxes, and so on. NASCAR is off the right -- one of those little bars.

Of course, people have multiple interests, and value different things at different times, and the graph will look different regionally, but let's keep is simple. The Liberals and the NDP are laughing because the Conservatives are going after the NASCAR demographic. That little blip on the graph way off to the right.

Off to the right? I meant to the right of the graph, but the unintended pun makes some sense, I suppose.

What next? Faith groups? Can't be many of those in Canada.

Maybe bowlers. Maybe rodeo fans. Maybe softball leagues. Maybe homosexuals who are fiscally and socially conservative.

Each of these little bars on the right of the graph. Some might be tiny.

But here's the thing. If you add each of those little bits together, they easily overwhelm the big bars.

That's what we call the "long tail". It's an internet thing. Google makes a fortune going after it. Before, online advertisers only looked at major sites with 25 million page views a month. A small blog like mine could never gain the interest of these advertisers.

But there are millions of sites like mine. Google developed AdSense that automatically linked targeted ads with appropriate websites. I might earn a few pennies or a few bucks a day. But multiply that by millions of websites, and suddenly the long tail is giving the New York Times website a serious pasting. Advertisers pay Google to place them on hundreds of very small websites but with very targeted audiences, websites that the advertisers would never be able to find, or be able to establish contracts with.

And that's the problem with going after the long tail. It is hard to organize. Each little bar along the right of the graph represents a smallish group of people that needs to be targeted specifically.

In the old days, those people would be abandoned. It was not cost-effective to talk to them.

In the case of the AdSense, however, Google leverages its content analysis algorithms used for site indexing to drive ad matching in an automated (and so cost-effective) manner.

In the case of NASCAR, the Conservatives are targeting a group that probably overlaps with several other "small bars" along the long tail. For a few thousand bucks in party cash, all those NASCAR eyes will see the Conservative Party logo. And where there is no overlap with the NASCAR demographic, the Conservatives will develop another means of attracting another key demographic.

It's hard work, but the alternative -- just being the environment guy 24/7 -- is both lazy and inherently vulnerable. If the Conservatives pick up the votes from two dozen long tail interest groups, and then loses one because of a tough policy decision or a foolish comment, well, there are twenty-three groups still voting for you. If the Liberals lose the environment issue, splitting it with the NDP, for example, what's left?

Like the graph shows, there is nothing to the left of the environment, and if the Tories pick up the majority of the items to the right...

There's that pun again.

In the mean time, the Liberals, the NDP, and the Greens (and the Conservatives, for that matter) will fight it out for those few big items -- the environment and health care and taxation and such. Actually, the serious four-way fight will probably just be for one of those bars. There will be some successes and some failures for each party within these interest zones, but at the end of the day, it is the party the breaks out of the confines of the media-driven "only thing that matters" mentality and reaches out to all the various interest groups out there, like racing fans, and speaks to what is important to them in a respectful way that is aligned with a coherent party platform that will win out.

First NASCAR, then the bowling leagues, then the gay social conservatives. One interest group and one riding at a time.

Denis Coderre's comments show that the Liberal Party thinks only about the environment. If you don't think the environment is the only issue to base your vote on, your vote doesn't matter. You must be one of those little bars. But he's wrong.

Those votes do matter.

Because capturing the long tail is to win.

Ask Google.

By the way, do I have some inside knowledge that says this is the strategy? No I don't. I'm just speculating that this is part of a Tory strategy to go after the long tail, even if I'm the only one who uses that term.

And congratulations to Bourque for landing that sponsorship. There are not too many people who are perceived as being so successful at connecting with people both online and in the real world.

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